Memoir
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
educated by terror. Westover, Chapter one. Choose the good. My strongest memory is not a memory. It's something I imagined then came to remember as if it had happened. The memory was formed when I was five, just before I turned six from a story my father told in such detail that I and my brothers and sister had each conjured our own cinematic version with gunfire and shouts. Mine had crickets. That's the sound I hear as my family huddles in the kitchen. Lights off, hiding from the feds have surrounded the house. A woman reaches for a glass of water and her silhouette is lighted by the moon. A shot echoes like the lash of the whip, and she falls in my memory. It's always Mother who falls, and she has a baby in her arms. The baby doesn't make sense. I'm the youngest of my mother's seven Children, but like I said, none of this happened. A year after my father told us that story. We gathered one evening thio, hear him read aloud from Isaiah. Ah, prophecy about Emmanuel. He sat on our mustard colored sofa. Ah, large Bible opened in his lap. Mother was next to him. The rest of us were strewn across the shaggy brown carpet, butter and honey Shall he eat? Dad droned low and monotone, weary from a long day hauling scrap that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. There was a heavy pause. We sat quietly. My father was not a tall man, but he was able to command a room. He had a presence about him like an oracle. His hands were thick and leathery, the hands of a man who'd been hard at work all his life, and they grasped the Bible firmly. He read the passage, allowed a second time, then a third, then 1/4. With each repetition, the pitch of his voice climbed higher. His eyes, which moments before had been swollen with fatigue, were now wide and alert. There was a divine doctrine here, he said. He would inquire of the Lord. The next morning, Dad purged our fridge of milk, yogurt and cheese, and that evening, when he came home, his truck was loaded with 50 gallons of honey. Isaiah doesn't say which is evil. Butter or honey, Dad said, grinning as my brother's lugged the white tubs to the basement. But if you ask, the Lord will tell you. When Dad read the verse to his mother, she laughed in his face. I got some Panies in my purse, she said. You better take them. They'll be all the since you got. Grandma had a thin, angular face and an endless store of faux Indian jewelry, all silver and turquoise, which hung in clumps from her spin lee neck and fingers. Because she lived down the hill from us near the highway, we called her grandma down the hill. This was to distinguish her from our mother's mother, who we called Grandma over in town because she lived 15 miles south in the Onley town in the county, which had a single stoplight and a grocery store.